Apple’s new Thunderbolt cable, just released, at $49 is reported by ars technica to be “an active cable” with transceiver chips on each end.

Apple released the Thunderbolt cable on Tuesday, alongside the first compatible peripherals–external RAID systems from Promise, which range in price from $999 to $1,999. Early tests of the Promise systems have revealed blazing fast write speeds of up to 700MB/s, as much as 21 times faster than FireWire and USB 2.0.